ITALY: Italian scientists reconstruct Dante's face with a new nose

Popular conceptions of the face or profile of the author of the Divine Comedy -- considered one of the greatest literary works of the early Renaissance -- have always been dictated by artists' renditions. Now, Italian scientists have reconstructed Dante's face some 700 years after he died. Italian scientists have made a reconstruction of the face of poet Dante some 700 years after he died and have found some surprises, particularly about the supposed shape of his famous aquiline nose. Most images of Dante were made after he died in 1321 and were "psychological renditions" of how artists believed the face of the master of the Italian language should look. Members of the multi-disciplinary project which created Dante's new face discovered that Dante probably had a hooked nose but it was pudgy rather than pointy and crooked rather than straight, almost as if he had been punched. "It's a strong and important nose which points downwards - which is an aquiline nose," said Professor Giorgio Gruppioni, an anthropologist at the University of Bologna's campus in Ravenna, the Adriatic city where Dante is buried. The team of scientists, including anthropologists and forensic engineers, based their work on calculations made on Dante's skull by Professor Fabio Frassetto in 1921, the only time it has been removed from its crypt. Frassetto took precise measurements and secretly made a plaster model. "This is much more realistic than other images," said researcher Stefano Benazzi who worked on the skull. Dante's bones were hidden by Franciscan monks in Ravenna from 1677 to 1865. The monks believed they could be stolen by agents from Florence, Dante's home town. Secretly tunnelling into his tomb, they removed the remains and hid them just metres away from his official resting place. The remains were found by chance after a water leakage near the site caused part of a wall to be removed. The skeleton was discovered in a wooden box with an inscription 'Danti's bones: Placed here Year 1677, October 18th, by me, Friar Antonio Santi.' The skull was reconstructed by engineers of the University of Bologna at Forli and reconstruction artists from Pisa University used computer technology and forensic techniques to simulate muscle with plaster, plastic and other material. "The face that has been created has an excellent probability of resembling Dante but we cannot say it is identical," said Engineering Professor Franco Persiani. The engineers added wrinkles, eyebrows and even a real burgundy coloured Renaissance-style head covering and is, experts say, as close a copy of the real Dante that you can get. But replicating every wrinkle and an accurate facial expression is still out of the reach of modern day scientists.

ITN Source | January 19, 2007

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